Finnish developer Next Games has expanded to 150 staff and launched seven games since it was acquired by streaming giant Netflix.
Speaking at Pocket Gamer Connects Nordics last week, Next Games managing director Saara Bergström opened up exactly on what the studio has been up to in the four years since it was bought.
“Surprisingly enough they don’t pay me for conference talks, they pay me for games,” she said, highlighting the developer's relative lack of public activity in recent years.
The studio was founded in May 2013, with Bergström joining early on as the company’s CMO. Next Games found success with licensed free-to-play mobile games such as The Walking Dead No Man’s Land and The Walking Dead: Our World. Prior to Netflix’s acquisition, the team worked with the streaming firm for Stranger Things: Puzzle Tales.
The job now is not to continue where it left off, but do something new.
“Our job as a first-party studio is not to fill a catalogue, it is not to fill the shelves with lots of products. Our focus is really on the quality, not the quantity,” explained Bergström.
“Every single game that we make of course needs to be a delightful, fun experience that serves the audience that we’re creating these games for, but it also has an ulterior motive. So we always take at least one or two or sometimes three of the hardest problems that Netflix needs to resolve to make games work for Netflix.
“Whether that’s a technology challenge, whether that’s a new type of collaboration between different teams at Netflix, whether that’s engineering, transmedia, creative and so on and so forth.”
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